Lawsuit Against LPSS Emerges Over Failed Property Deal of Former Walmart Building in North Lafayette

The owner of a north Lafayette building is suing the Lafayette Parish School Board after the agency backed out on purchasing a portion of the former Walmart Supercenter building.

According to a report from Adam Daigle with the Acadiana Advocate, J&J Commercial Real Estate, which owns the building at 1229 NW Evangeline Thruway, filed suit in district court last month over the $5 million deal for about half of the building that both parties agreed to late last year.

The deal involved the seller making about $1 million in upgrades to the building, including a dividing wall to separate it from the building’s current tenant, Completeful, a drop-shipping company that moved into the building two years ago.

J&J Commercial Real Estate, which records show is registered to John Derek Moore and Completeful owner Josh Goree, is requesting LPSS either complete the purchase of the building or reimburse the seller for damages stipulated in the purchase agreement along with legal fees.

School officials declined to comment on the matter.

The Advocate report goes on to say the matter dates back to nearly a year ago when the school board voted to authorize its board president or then-Superintendent Irma Trosclair to enter into an agreement buy the property to use as warehouse space. But the deal began to unravel, court documents show, over disputes regarding the deadline to make improvements that school officials requested as part of the purchase agreement.

School officials indicated in a Nov. 14 letter that the seller had 90 days with a possible 60-day extension to complete the work, which included a dividing wall, subdividing the HVAC and other utilities and providing stormwater detention. Both sides also agreed to other aspects of the deal.

In a letter dated April 12, Moore notified LPSS officials the work was “substantially complete” and called on LPSS to initiate the closing process as part of the purchase agreement.

Trosclair, however, responded in a letter dated May 26 that the work was not completed by the deadline of April 26 and that school officials “elected to terminate the purchase agreement,” the letter said. The letter indicated a cancellation agreement had been sent to the sellers on May 4 but had not been signed.

According to Daigle's Advocate report, Goree claimed LPSS officials stopped responding to requests as the deadline approached as to how they wanted to handle the process of dividing the electrical system in the building. His group even offered LPSS $100,000 to build it to suit, he said.

It was the beginning of lack of responses from school officials, he said.

“No correspondence,” he said. “Couldn’t get anything back. That’s when things really started going basically south. We didn’t know how to move forward. So when they say we didn’t meet the deadline, that’s totally on them because we couldn’t.”

School officials claimed the dividing wall was not up to code, Goree said. Both sides met to discuss the matter, and Goree claimed his real estate agent indicated before the meeting that school officials were interested in backing out of the deal.

The wall, he was told later by state and city fire officials, was not needed to separate the two entities.

“So we spent extra money, did extra work to get that wall set up because they kept telling us that we needed to when we didn’t,” Goree said. “We went above and beyond. (The sale) would have been a great deal for us. There’s no reason why we shouldn’t have completed all this. We were all excited about using the capital from it to accelerate Completeful’s growth.”

J&J’s attorneys have been mostly unsuccessful in recent months to get school officials to respond, Goree claimed. Others involved in the process also were difficult to contact. Yet he claimed the day after the suit was filed his business received notice from the school board, which oversees tax collection in the parish, that his business was being audited.

“Of all the business I’ve ever had, and I’ve had a ton of them, I’ve never had sales tax office come and audit me,” Goree said. “It’s just kind of ridiculous.”

See the full story from The Acadiana Advocate here.